Sunday, October 23, 2016

As someone who studies psychology, few things grind my gears
like someone pointing out that the latest psychological findings are something
that their grandmother could have told them. Regardless of how much psychological
insight their own grandmothers may have, there are always some people willing
to tell you that you are wasting public or private funds on investigating a
question to which people have known the answer for generations.

If someone says they are a quantum physicist or a brain
surgeon, most people who do not share the profession would be hesitant to try
and opine on quantum physics or brain surgery. Regardless of what you do in life,
however, it is likely that your mind is geared to some extent towards
developing theories about the thoughts of others around you. You see two
managers in work who employ very different management styles, and you come up
with hypotheses as to why each manager chose that style, as well as which style
works best with which employee. You are spending a few weeks studying for
exams, so you test which learning strategies work best to help you memorise as
much information as you can.

..and people have been doing this since before there was a
discipline called psychology. So of
course, when you see a news report on a new finding from a psychological study,
it chimes with something you heard from someone else, who was really just
speaking from good old-fashioned experience and a bit of introspection. When
you remember what that person said, it may feel that what you’re hearing is not
really news at all.

At a basic level, empirical psychology can be used to quantify the extent of phenomena we may
already be aware of. The fact that people were willing to comply with Milgram’s
commands to administer high electric shocks to strangers may chime with
people’s intuitions, but the rate of
compliance was considerably higher than predicted. We all know that staying
awake all night is generally not good for reaching optimal performance, but is
it enough to make junior doctors perform worse at the level of basic attention?
This is an empirical question.

But we can go further in saying that psychological research
can often demonstrate the direction of an effect (i.e. whether x increases or
decreases y), where everyday theorising would fail. Why? It’s worth bearing in
mind that intuition can come up with two opposing
predictions that both make sense at an a
priori level. What effect does
stress have on cognition? Well, it’s distracting, so it should have a negative
effect on how you think. No wait, it’s motivating, so it should have a positive
effect. But when people see a report that confirms one, they may only think of
the intuition that chimed with the observed effect, thereby making seem that
the researchers were just stating the obvious.

Even when armchair psychology is prone to predicting
an effect in a particular direction, the research may contradict this. A while back BPS digest published an interesting post concerning counter-intuitive findings in psychology. Check it out!

Monday, October 17, 2016

Hello
Professor, I’ve been studying the brain and the mind for some time now, but I
want to find some way of gaining greater insight into how the function of the
mind-you know, thinking, emotion and so on-is produced by the physical brain. I
just want an intuitive, first-hand
sense of how it all happens!

Well Andrew,
I have just the thing for you! This is the autocerebroscope;
a device will allow you to see inside your own brain as it works. Let’s say
you’re eating a delicious falafel-flavoured chocolate. The autocerebroscope
will show you the oxygenated blood flowing to your occipital lobe as you
process the visual stimulus, your motor cortices working to chew the food, your
nucleus accumbens going into overdrive as you feel the intense pleasure of the
tasty choco…the works!

Sounds
amazing-so I’ll be able to see changes in my own brain activity as they happen-I’ll
take it home and try it out!

*Andrew
exits*

II

*Wind
chimes jangle*

Well well
Andrew, what can I do you for?

Hello
Professor, I’m blown away by this thing! The autocerebroscope does exactly what
you said that it would.

Pretty
impressive, yes?

Absolutely!
It’s just…

Yes?

The
problem is that I want to know more than which brain regions are being
activated. I want to gain some insight into how
they are working together to produce the workings of the mind. At the
moment I can say that when I’m involved in problem solving I’m using my prefrontal
cortex, but I’m not sure how the various sub-regions of this cortex are working
together to solve the problem.

Okay, well
how about I give you insight not only into which regions of the brain are being
activated as you think, but also which neural impulses are going from one part
of the brain to the other?

That
sounds great, but I can foresee a roadblack; I can only process so much information
in real time within my own brain as this same brain generates its vastly
complex activity.

No
problemo, We will give you an add-in that produces a summary of the inputs that
are being sent from one brain region to the other. You may have to use memory a
bit, as there may be a bit of a lag, but it should give you an even deeper
insight into the workings of your own brain! I’ll see you later-take your time
practicing with that bad boy.

III

*Ding a
ling a ling*

Hello
Professor, good to see you again.

You must
have some tremendous insights by now Andrew!

To be
honest, I feel that I’ve made less progress this time. When I read the outputs,
well, they do seem to be a summary of very many neural impulses.

Yeah,
pretty cool, right?

Absolutely!
It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be fully meaningful correspondence between
the concepts as I experience them and the information going from one brain
region to the other. When I was smelling a half-empty crisp packet that I found
in the rubbish the other day I could see a whole hosts of impulses in my brain
corresponding to constituent compounds making up the smell. In theory these
impulses based on compounds should add up to the overall sense of the odour,
but when I looked at the outputs coming and going between the various parts of
the brain I couldn’t see the Gestalt
of the scent as a whole.

Hmm, it
seems like these concepts are being produced by the interaction of various
activities between various different brain regions.

But I want
a real-time readout that will allow me to gain sufficient insight into the
workings of my own brain that correspond
to the actual overall feeling of my experience! Furthermore, if I could do as
much it would be great as well to consciously change the activity of my brain
to re-wire my conscious lived experience.

Like a
process of biofeedback?

Exactly!

Er- okay…you
are setting the bar rather high…but if you collect it from my assistant in the
next couple of weeks I’m sure we’ll have something cooked up for you.

IV

*Andrew
bursts through the office door*

Yes! You’ve
done it Professor! I can perceive and understand the exact workings of my brain
generating this feeling, even as I
subjectively feel it! Now, with a bit of effort I can tweak the activity of
my hypothalamus to dampen the release of stress hormones-excellent-now I can optimise
connectivity in the prefrontal cortex to improve my planning of this
biofeedback process itself-soon I will have cognition second to none!

Hmmmm.

Are you
okay, Professor? This is tremendous! Why do you seem so negative? Are you worried
about me abusing my power?

No, it’s
more an intellectual concern. What you’re saying is all well and good, but it just
applies for you. Who’s to say that my experience is not generated by
different brain processes, or that my subjective states of mind feel the same?

Well
Professor, I’m sure that you probably do use your brain in somewhat different
ways to me. In terms of how things feel,
well, at the same time as the autocerebroscope is showing me in the inner
workings of my brain, I can also see the nerves and how they are projecting to
and from other parts of the body. Feelings are tied up with a visceral response that extends
throughout the body, so I’m sure that even if we did have the exact same types
of brains that happened to be wired up and working in exactly the same way,
then subjective feelings would still feel
different, given differences elsewhere in our bodies.

Yes yes
yes, but who’s to say that for some people these workings of the brain feel
like anything at all?

……Eh, I
don’t know, but surely the fact that it can
be the case even for one person is important? This is a clear demonstration
that conscious experience is possible without having to appeal to some
immaterial ectoplasm-type stuff?

Not necessarily,
Allen! It may only produce something that’s conscious experience-or something like consciousness- for you. But not like qualia for most
people. Without access to your experience how do I know you’re really linking
the brain activity with the bare bones of
qualia (as I experience it) or rather with some easy problem like how your
brain is processing a particular sensory input, which may anyway be enough for you to count as qualia, but not enough
to count as qualia for someone with such depth of feeling as myself?

To me, this
seems like a dichotomous, either/or approach to consciousness. Even if your
experience is more complex than mine, then surely if I can tell you how the
workings of my brain make up my awareness of the world, then that would show
that consciousness can be explained by the workings of the brain?

More complex? Andrew, the mere fact that I
can engage in more complex information processing and emotion is beside the
point. Consciousness is fundamental-that
is, it is so simple it cannot be broken down into any simpler parts!

If you’re
right, then the only way for you to know is to have the insight into your own
brain…why don’t you try the autocerebroscope on yourself Professor, and see
what it’s like?

I’m sorry,
it gives me a tension headache. Anyway, I have some papers to write up on why
human experience is irreducible to brain states.

*Andrew
rolls eyes and leaves office with his new toy*

Apology
1: The device pictured is, needless to say, not the mythical final version of
the autocerebroscope described in the story below, but rather an
electroencephalogram (which reads the neural activity via electrodes-like all current
brain imaging technologies, it is quite far from doing what gets described in
the latter parts of the story below).

Apology
2: This story is influenced by numerous thinkers I’ve read over the years-sorry
I can’t remember all of my influences here to attribute them. Let me know in
the comments if anyone stands out as deserving more of a mention here.